


For Your Sins

by lyonet



Series: A Right Turn After Bad Idea [5]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: (I really wouldn't worry about it), Break Up, F/F, Fluff, Getting Back Together, Light Angst, M/M, Past minor character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 16:44:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7395484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyonet/pseuds/lyonet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“No, I mean, we broke up.” Arthur swallowed. “He broke up with me.”</p>
<p>That statement gave Morgana a series of war flashbacks to university, when it had seemed to be Arthur’s mission in life to date terrible people and in the process miss every clue as to how terrible they were. He had not noticed Valiant using the Pendragon family’s reputation as a social launching pad, or Ewain basking in the reflected glory, or Sophia’s everything. Morgana had met Merlin once – well, twice if you counted ordering drinks off him on her hen’s night, but she didn’t remember that encounter too well – and he had seemed a reasonable enough person, but so had Sophia at first glance and see how that had turned out. </p>
<p>(At the bottom of a river with search and rescue divers and a media circus. That was how it had turned out. Sophia was the worst, and Morgana would never let Arthur forget she had told him so.)</p>
<p>“What happened?” she demanded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Your Sins

Morgana had never wanted a brother. As she liked to remind Arthur, she had voted for a sister, and actually she had got one, just twenty years and change overdue. But when your mother secretly adopted out her first child, cheated on her husband with your father (his best friend) to produce her second, then died in a spectacularly suspicious car crash and became an Agatha Christie character in your head as opposed to a real person, the one thing you got out of the whole disastrous mess was perspective. Arthur might be exasperating, but he was reliable. If Morgana got locked out of her apartment or needed someone to look after her dragons, or on more than one occasion intercede with Uther before a fight blew up beyond resolvable levels, Arthur would come through.

So, when she was woken up by his phone call at three in the morning, an hour after she’d gone to sleep, she envisaged raising an army of the dead to destroy him and everything he loved, and then she picked up. “What?” she hissed.

“I think Merlin broke up with me,” Arthur said. He sounded like he was in shock, or that time Morgana misjudged her racket swing and gave him a concussion.

It sounded serious, so Morgana sat up and tried to pull her attention off her pillow. “You mean you had an argument with Merlin?” she hazarded. “Because you’ve been relating your conversations with him word-for-word since you started dating, he’s practically all you ever talk about – well, Merlin and work – and from what I’ve heard, arguing is your foreplay.”

“No, I mean, we broke up.” Arthur swallowed. “He broke up with me.”

That statement gave Morgana a series of war flashbacks to university, when it had seemed to be Arthur’s mission in life to date terrible people and in the process miss every clue as to how terrible they were. He had not noticed Valiant using the Pendragon family’s reputation as a social launching pad, or Ewain basking in the reflected glory, or Sophia’s everything. Morgana had met Merlin once – well, twice if you counted ordering drinks off him on her hen’s night, but she didn’t remember that encounter too well – and he had seemed a reasonable enough person, but so had Sophia at first glance and see how that had turned out.

(At the bottom of a river with search and rescue divers and a media circus. That was how it had turned out. Sophia was the worst, and Morgana would never let Arthur forget _she had told him so_.)

“What happened?” she demanded.

“What’s happening?” Vivian yawned, rolling over on the other side of the bed, pulling off her satin sleep mask. Morgana gave the grimace that Vivian would recognise as her Arthur face and put the phone on speaker.

“Talk,” she ordered, so Arthur talked.

* * *

“Slow down,” Freya said, pushing her laptop shut. “Arthur broke up with you? Are you sure this isn’t another argument? Because you do that a lot, Merlin, and it seems to work out for you. What went wrong?”

Merlin gulped. It sounded like he’d been crying for a while before making the call, and possibly drinking. Since the only alcohol he kept at home was, to Freya’s knowledge, the very strong whisky his godfather had given him last Christmas, it was amazing he was sober enough to explain anything. His alcohol tolerance was worryingly low for a bartender.

“I was talking to Kilgarrah,” he began, and Freya sat back with a sigh. Good things rarely came out of conversations with Kilgarrah. “And he said I should tell my dad about dating Arthur, which, you know, since he’d met Mum, it seemed like the right thing to do. So I called Dad – ” Freya rubbed a hand over her eyes. Good things rarely came out of conversations with Balinor either. “ – and eventually I got through, and I was telling him about it, and then I told him Arthur’s name.”

Freya waited. “Then what happened?” she prodded.

“Yeah, turns out he knows who Arthur is. Or at least he knows Arthur’s father, because Uther Pendragon ruined his life.”

* * *

“How was I supposed to know Dad had fired him? It’s not like I keep track of his employee records! And Merlin didn’t _say._ I thought we were talking about politics and, well, I know Dad is really conservative and he’s made some mistakes, but the media can be really unfair. I didn’t know _that_ was what we were really arguing about until we already were.”

“So you defended Uther,” Morgana said tiredly. “Like you always do.”

“Of course I defended him, he’s my father!”

“He’s my father too, and I think he’s an asshole,” Morgana pointed out. “Was there really no hint that Merlin was taking this personally?”

“He didn’t _say,_ ” Arthur repeated, miserably. “I’m not a mind-reader.”

“It was shitty of him to bring it up at all,” Vivian said firmly. Nothing woke her up more effectively than getting stuck into a fight. “What did he expect you to do about this, get his father’s job back? Tar and feather Uther for sacking someone once upon a time? He’s an important man. I’m sure he sacks a lot of people. My father does.”

“Oh. Sorry, Vivian,” Arthur said, audibly pulling himself together, “did I wake you?”

“You didn’t apologise for waking _me_ ,” Morgana muttered darkly. “And Viv, darling, you’ve got a point, but remember how many people hate Olaf? Including you?”

“Not _all_ the time,” Vivian said. “He’s my father, I’m the only one who gets to decide whether I hate him or not. He did apologise for what he said at the engagement party. And he paid for my wedding dress, so I know he meant it.”

Knowing how much the dress had cost, Morgana could not argue that one. Arthur cleared his throat and she remembered she was supposed to be giving out sisterly advice. “What did Merlin want you to do about it?” she asked.

* * *

“I didn’t know what to do,” Merlin said thickly. “It seemed like something Arthur should hear about, but I didn’t know where to start. Dad was so angry. I was thinking, what if I _don’t_ tell Arthur, how am I going to explain why my dad hates him?” Merlin blew his nose and gave a weak laugh. “I guess that’s not a problem any more. Not like they’re going to meet now.”

Freya did not think she was qualified for giving out family counselling, given she had not talked to anyone from _her_ family in years, but Merlin knew that – he had been her shoulder to cry on during the bad years in high school, before she cut contact for good – so she did the only thing she could think of at three a.m. on a Sunday for someone else’s break-up. “I’m going to the freezer and getting ice-cream,” she said. “Come with me, grab a spoon and we’ll talk about this properly.”

She had the flat to herself. Lamia was out doing whatever Lamia did when she wasn’t here. She kept even weirder hours than Freya, but always paid rent on time and got along with the cats, so it worked fine. Freya got comfortable on the sofa, balancing a tub of strawberry gelato on her crossed legs, her phone tucked against her ear so she could hear the sounds of Merlin doing the same thing in his own flat. Her big tabby Bastet jumped onto the back of the sofa and started purring reassuringly in her ear; Freya tipped the phone towards her, letting Merlin hear it too.

“What did Arthur say?” she asked.

“He didn’t talk. He shouted,” Merlin said grimly. He swallowed a mouthful of his ice-cream and went on, “Uther sacked my dad for leaking a story to the media after the Lefay car crash – they were Uther’s friends, he was sleeping with Vivienne Lefay, she was Morgana’s mother – ”

“Um, Merlin, did Arthur tell you any of this himself? It’s pretty personal.”

“No,” Merlin groaned, “and I didn’t want to know, I wish I hadn’t called Dad at all, but he told my everything and it’s so unfair. Uther sacked my dad for something he didn’t do. Dad had to change careers, it wrecked my parents’ marriage, there’s all this history I didn’t know my family had and I tried to explain that to Arthur, but he wouldn’t _listen_.”

Freya licked her spoon thoughtfully. “Well,” she said at last, “you already knew Uther Pendragon sucks as a person. He’s a dinosaur. One of the big stompy ones who went around roaring their heads off. It’s really awful he did that to your dad, but it happened a long time ago.”

“Not to him.”

“How did it wreck his marriage, though? I mean, your mum didn’t bring it up when she met Arthur, and she definitely knew who he was. She’d have said something if she blamed Uther for her divorce, don’t you think? Just so you’d be prepared? And your dad is sort of – don’t take this the wrong way, Merlin, but he’s sort of misanthropic. Nobody made him move to Wales and live at the top of a mountain so he could avoid the rest of humanity, he chose to do that. Hasn’t he been pretty happy there? Maybe he thought speech-writing was going to be his life, but he likes carpentry now, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t…I suppose so,” Merlin said doubtfully. “He was really worked up, Freya.”

“That doesn’t mean his life is still ruined. I get worked up about a lot of things that can’t hurt me any more. Maybe he does too. Arthur shouldn’t have shouted at you, it wasn’t your fault and it was crappy of him to blame you, but what happened to your dad wasn’t his fault either.”

“I never said it was!”

“Are you sure he knows that?”

* * *

“He was _crying_ ,” Arthur said, sounding appalled. He had always been hopeless at dealing with people crying, particularly if he was responsible for it. “I don’t know where it went wrong.”

“Shouting at him was not a high point,” Morgana said.

“Siding with your father when you don’t agree with him wasn’t a good idea either,” Vivian added.

“And questioning the validity of Balinor’s story was, to put it mildly, a fucking stupid thing to do,” Morgana concluded. “I’m not saying Uther was really an evil tyrant – in this _specific_ instance – but he made a mistake that did a lot of damage to someone else’s life, and you can acknowledge that without damning yourself to Bad Son Hell.”

Arthur was silent, which hopefully meant he was getting the point.

“Also,” Vivian said, “him asking you to leave his flat doesn’t necessarily mean him asking you to leave his life. I often ask Morgana to go away during a fight, one time I asked her to leave the country, but I didn’t want her to leave _permanently_.”

“I shout sometimes,” Morgana admitted, since apparently they were all baring their souls around the confessional speaker phone. “I’ve said things I didn’t mean to say when I was angry. Mostly I do mean it, but not always.”

“And then she buys me apology jewellery,” Vivian said, taking Morgana’s hand, “and we have fantastic make-up sex, and we remember that we are free and wild goddesses who should be fighting on the same team to defeat our foes.”

Arthur was silent some more. “I don’t think that’s very applicable to us.”

“Let me summarise for you,” Vivian announced. “You screwed up. He screwed up. For people who talk as much as the two of you do, you’re shit at communication. You need to calm down, and then you need to talk to him, and we can get back to our honeymoon. I didn’t buy a new vibrator and my body weight in lace lingerie to deal with your relationship problems.”

“Good talk!” Arthur said hastily, and hung up. Morgana sank back into the pillows with a sigh of relief.

“You’re so clever,” she said appreciatively, curling around Vivian. “Let’s sleep for a few hours, then try out some more of that new lingerie, what do you think? I want to see you in that corset.”

“And the handcuffs,” Vivian yawned. “Your turn this time.”

* * *

“…so you think that _he_ thinks I wanted him to fix everything?” Merlin said dubiously. “That’s ridiculous, there’s nothing he could do.” He paused, and added slowly, “And nothing Dad would want him to do, short of talking Uther into a public apology.”

Freya put the half-empty tub of gelato back in the freezer. The cats, hearing the fridge door open, emerged from the woodwork to investigate and she had to scatter around some grated cheese to appease their disappointed mewing. “I could be wrong,” she reminded Merlin, “but it’s worth finding out. Text him, then get some sleep.” She glanced at the clock. “ _I_ need some sleep.”

“Thanks, Freya.” Merlin sounded a lot steadier now, much less like he was going to make drunk phone calls to his not-yet-confirmed-as-an-ex. “You give great advice, you know.”

“I should be an agony aunt,” Freya agreed. “Have some ice-cream and back away from the worst case scenario, make sure you know what’s actually going on, rinse and repeat. I’ll be on TV.”

She hung up and crawled into bed, followed by Bastet, who liked to nap on her head. She slept straight through the text Merlin sent at four a.m. ( _He called, he said he’s sorry, he’s coming over_ ) and the one sent at five ( _YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. So_ _glad I didn’t call Will_ ) and the one sent at eight ( _make-up sex is the best sex_ ). Not even a paw dabbing at her nose could stir her. When she eventually resurfaced around ten, pushing a cat’s nose out of her ear, she found a fourth text, this time from Morgana.

_Welcome to drama club. We have T-shirts._


End file.
